About the Research Programme

The Programme

The Landscape and Environment Programme was established in September 2005 with the appointment by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Professor Stephen Daniels as Programme Director. The Directorate was formed with the appointment of a Programme Coordinator and was based in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham. The £5.5 million transdisciplinary Programme initially ran from September 2005 to December 2010 but continued throughout the Director's Impact Fellowship (2011-13) with the addition of a Research Fellow.

The Programme incorporated a wide range of funding opportunities, including large and small research projects, networks, workshops and studentships. A further associated network call 'Researching Environmental Change' was made in 2009 with the successfully funded projects running for a year from summer 2010.

Scope and themes

Landscape and environment are currently of compelling cultural significance, as fields of scholarly research, sites of artistic creativity and arenas of public concern. As both imaginative representations and material realities, landscape and environment matter as a medium for the expression of complex ideas and feelings, about beauty, belonging, access to resources, relations with nature, the past and the future, making sense of the world and people's place in it. Such concerns are topical, but they are not new. In the mind and on the ground, landscape and environment are conditioned historically by sometimes far reaching cultural forms and processes, and in complex patterns and structures which demand a range of disciplinary perspectives to understand them.

The aim of the Programme was to advance knowledge, critically and creatively, of the cultural forms and processes shaping, and shaped by, landscape and environment. It broke new ground in bringing together researchers from a wide range of disciplines and approaches (including those for whom practice is integral to the research) to address the changing ways landscapes and environments have been imagined, experienced, designed, made and managed, and in communicating research findings to a wide audience.

The Programme extended the scope and deepened the focus of enquiry by examining landscapes and environments articulated in words, pictures, performance, patterns of building and cultivation and in forms of conduct and livelihood. It did so for a range of historical periods and places, and in a dialogue with current debates on landscape and environment in the public domain. Research of the highest quality, inventively conceived, rigorously pursued, imaginatively produced and well disseminated, has enriched understandings of landscape and environment at all levels.